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Happy New Year

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Let’s start the year with a bit of fun.

Anybody able to guess where this picture was taken? Where exactly it was taken?
Here is a shed fancies fantasy! I doubt if anybody can guess where this one was taken, except the reader who took the picture of course. Anybody care to make a guess?
The clue for this one is cake with lots of cream, and cherries. Same clue for this one.

We had a bit of fun during the last ‘tea’ of the New Year retreat this afternoon. We told stories of our near brushes with near fame, quite a favourite with the monastic community as well. One chap told us about how his six month old Dalmatian puppy was in the 101 Dalmatians. Apparently the film took a long time to make and the Dalmatians needed to be around six months old. So as the puppies aged they were retired and new ones drawn in from a register. All over England eager owners of young pups kept their fingers crossed they would be called to stardom. I later heard the dog died a few weeks ago, aged twelve.

Fun is fine.

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Uncategorised

The Fifth Thought

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We accept this food so that we may become enlightened.

We are taught in Zen not to waste food, not to throw it away, not to let it spoil or go bad.

In the Dhammapada there is this verse from the Old Age section:

Those who while still young
neither choose a life of renunciation
nor earn a good living,
will end up bemoaning the past,
falling like spent arrows
that have missed their mark.

Verse 156

At the turning of the year, walk on in faith. Eat your life wholeheartedly and above all do not waste it.

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Daily Life, Teachings

The Fourth Thought

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Just bumped into a chap in the cloister and we had a chat. He was leaving the New Year retreat early. Some might say he had failed because he didn’t make it through to the end. Not so, definitely not so.

I’ve just eaten three chocolates, he said holding up three fingers in front of his face. Three chocolates, I just saw them on offer in the common room and took three. He was triumphant. Err? You’ll have to fill me in a bit more on that one. He did. Apparently last time here he could hardly eat anything, it was a real struggle to sit and eat a meal. To actually put food in his mouth. Why’s that then? I asked. Oh, you know. Guilt and all of that stuff.

We parted. OK if I email you? Sure. Go to my Jade Mountains web site and you can email me from there. Same goes for anybody who wants to write me.

The fourth of the Five Thoughts is: we will eat lest we become lean and die. Few of us are eating to keep flesh on our bodies so obviously this has levels of meaning just like the preceding three. Our friend above, like so many people, go head to head with life and their troubles when faced with a plate of food. To eat or not. To eat life, or not.

Eating ones life, actively connecting with what’s there and eating without picking and choosing is practice. People dying inside for lack of nourishment is a very very sad sight. And so when people come here who struggle with life and who then connect with the practice and eat, well that is cause for joy.

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Teachings

The Third Thought

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Continuing on with the Five Thoughts, the third goes thus: We must protect ourselves from error by excluding greed from our minds.

While it is obvious that one eats primarily for need not indulgence in greed and to be woofing down ones grub mindlessly is a mistake, however there is a primary mistake. The word exclude is the pointer here. To exclude greed, to exclude anything is to set something apart and separate. In the relative sense exercising greed keeps up the illusion of separation and at the same time ultimately it’s not possible to prise apart the Universe

During the retreat a few weeks ago I suggested to one of the guests that he might have a question to ask during one of our public question and answer ‘teas’. Sure enough he did and it gave me an opportunity to make a point which relates very much to the matter of excluding.

What Question?
An honoured monk suggests I
Might have an interesting
Question or two
But really what else
Is there to ask
Besides how to solve
The Great Matter
And this bothersome “I”?

What Reply?
In this unfractured universe
where can this
“bothersome”*
be found?
Why expend so much
energy looking for fractures
in this unfractured
unfracturable
whole?

Many thanks to Puerhan, come and visit us again. Not sure about the ‘honoured monk’ though. Uh! There I go trying to fracture the universe again…

BTW The Great Matter refers to the question of life and death.

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Curiosities, Out and About, Teachings

The Second Thought

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Along with the life saving ColdFX capsules from Edmonton (thanks Mike) were a couple of clippings from Canadian Geographic. I’d heard Mike tell of the ice roads in the Northwest Territories, and beyond into Nunavut which reaches into the Arctic Circle. Each spring in late January or early February Mike dispatches truck loads of supplies to the diamond and gold mines in the far north. It is a big eye opener to see what is going on in an area of the world we could be forgiven for thinking is uninhabited and uninhabitable.

The Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road runs for 360 miles. Driving speed is 22 mph or less, trucks go out in convoys of three at a time, the ice has to be 40 ft thick to take the weight of the largest trucks. There always has to be two up in a truck and apparently drivers wave the seat belt rule to give themselves needed seconds to jump clear of their vehicle if the ice breaks. If I were up in Lac de Gras at -31c I’d have second thoughts about the wisdom of being there.

At the start of our feast today we recited the customary meal time verse, the Five Thoughts. The second thought is ‘we must consider our merit when accepting it’. One can understand this in a number of ways, for me it is a right now consideration. Eating a meal is not a life threatening activity however in terms of practice there is ultimately no room for past or future. I guess that must be the same for those truckers out on the ice.

Be careful out there!

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